Downpour. An ant abandons its dead caterpillar. An earthworm dangles from a cardinal’s bill.
caterpillars
Strands of caterpillar silk float on the breeze, appearing and disappearing as they pass through sunbeams. Ravens’ falsetto alarm calls.
The yelling of a crow unable to raise a mob. Sun glints on caterpillar silk strung like abandoned bunting among bare walnut-tree branches.
Wasps wallow through mounds of snakeroot flowers. At the woods’ edge, a yellow leaf trapped by a caterpillar thread never stops twirling.
Cloudy and cold. A caterpillar climbs my leg, its brown form so extravagantly furred it resembles a miniature, misplaced fashion accessory.
While the male chickadee calls from the end of a walnut branch, his mate combs the leaves for caterpillars, hovering, hanging upside-down.
An old strand of caterpillar silk at the wood’s edge shimmers in the sun. A crow keeps saying something urgent in four syllables.
Another cloudless morning. Sunlight glints on abandoned spider and caterpillar silk in every tree and between them—a threadbare garment.
A bristly white caterpillar on the freshly painted white porch railing. The sky too is white, and the lawn with its banks of snakeroot.